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Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Patricia Cornwell book excerpt: Inside the hunt for a killer

Patricia Cornwell's "Dust" book cover (Putnam)

(CBS News) In Patricia Cornwell's "Dust," the author continues the story of Kay Scarpetta in the twenty-first installment of her wildly popular series.

In "Dust," readers are re-introduced to the Scarpetta, chief medical examiner and the director of the Cambridge Forensic Center in Cambridge, Mass., where she coaxes the truth out of dead bodies and grisly acts of violence. At this point in her career, Scarpetta has seen it all and very little throws her, but right now she is exhausted and shaken having just returned from working one of the worst mass killings in U. S. history-the blood bath at the Newtown, Conn., elementary school. She's barely home and recovering from the flu when she gets a call about a dead body discovered on the nearby MIT campus. The grad student, identified as Gail Shipton, has been found on an athletic field wrapped in unusual cloth and posed in a deliberate way that suggests this isn't the killer's first victim.